The Destined Path of Water Chapter 17: Chapter 17: What He Tells Them

Read chapter 17 of The Destined Path of Water by Simply No One on NovelPedia.

Sae & Rika | Age 17 Sae He did not make us ask. That was the thing I noticed first he did not wait for us to find the right words or work up to the question or approach it carefully. He simply began, the way someone begins when they have been carrying something for a long time and the right moment has finally arrived and there is no reason to make it harder by delaying. He sent us an image first. The valley as it had been, a very long time ago, before the village, before the temple, before any of it. Just the hills and the rivers and the forest coming down to the water's edge, and the two rivers running through it, bright and fast and full, and in the water something vast and alive and entirely at home. Not diminished. Not tired. The full uncontained version of what was in front of us now, the dragon as he had been when the rivers were young and so was he, which was a long time ago by any measure. The image held for a moment and then shifted. The village arriving. Slowly, over generations, the trees giving way at the edges, houses appearing on the banks, people coming to the water. The festival beginning, small at first, then larger, the copper coins and the poured water and the gratitude, year after year, the village saying we remember, we have not forgotten, and the rivers answering by running full and clear and the dragon resting in them, present and sustained. Then the shift. Rika I felt it before I saw it in the images. The change. Not sudden, not dramatic, just the slow turn of a tide that goes out so gradually you do not notice until the water is much further than it was and the beach is wide and cold where it used to be warm and covered. The festival growing smaller in the images, the way it had been growing smaller in life. Not because people were unkind or faithless exactly, just because the world had gotten larger around the village and the old things had gotten quieter in proportion. The coins still came but fewer of them. The gratitude was still real but thinner, spread across more competing realities. And the rivers the upstream changes, the small diversions and redirections that had been happening for decades before the dam was ever proposed, each one minor on its own, all of them together amounting to something that was not minor at all. And the dragon, across all of it, diminishing by degrees so small that no single year you could have pointed to it and said there, that is when it changed. Just year by year, less than before. Less water. Less faith. Less of whatever it was that sustained something as old and particular as him. The images faded. He looked at us. "The dam," he said, "is not the beginning of this. It is the end of it." His voice was the same, that chest-first arrival, words and resonance together. But there was something in it now that had not been there before, something I would not call sadness exactly because it was too large and too long-standing for that word, but something in that direction. The feeling of someone who has watched something coming for a very long time and has made their peace with it and is now simply here, at the arrival. "When the dam is built," he said, "what remains of the rivers will not be enough. What remains of me will not be enough." A pause. The water moved around him, slow and deferential. "I will be gone. Not all at once. Just finished. The way a river is finished when there is nothing left to feed it." Sae The gold light in the water felt different after he said it. Still there. Still warm. But with a quality I had not noticed before, or had not let myself notice finite. The light of something burning its last. I looked at Rika. Her face was very still, that contained expression she had, except beneath it something was moving, something she had not decided yet whether to let out. I looked at the dragon. He was looking at us with those gold eyes, ancient and tired and and kind. That was the word I kept coming back to. Kind in a way that was not soft, not sentimen